Timing and frequency synchronization is a crucial part of wireless communication such as Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) technology based 3GPP Long Term Evolution (LTE) system. In fact, it is widely recognized that an OFDM based communication system is very sensitive to frequency and timing error and existing techniques do not meet the performance requirement for LTE uplink (UL) synchronization. The challenge for LTE UL timing synchronization is that, to keep the synchronization overhead as low as possible to preserve LTE system overall capacity, the radio resources are limited for timing estimation. That means only very narrow radio bandwidth, limited time duration and limited signal to noise ratio (SNR) for the reference signal are available, especially at cell edge. Accordingly, improved methods of radio link timing synchronization in LTE systems remain highly desirable.
It will be noted that throughout the appended drawings, like features are identified by like reference numerals.